GDC 2011 Cinematic Character Lighting in SWTOR - SWTOR-Slicers/WikiPedia GitHub Wiki

This is a Game Developers Conference 2011 presentation by BioWare's Ben Cloward (Senior Technical Artist) and Aaron Otstott (Senior Software Engineer), where they describe the concept art-like, "stylized realism" that was set as a goal for SWTOR's graphic style, opposite to the usual aim for photorealism, and how it was achieved. They discuss the implementation via shaders and other methods of techniques such as gradient lighting, rim lighting, depth of field, automatic camera and light positioning, etc., several of which are being or have been implemented by the SWTOR Slicers team in tools like TORCommunity.com's Character Designer, Unreal and Blender shaders, etc.

The videorecording of the presentation is 59 minutes-long (48 minutes of actual presentation plus Q&A).

The slides can be downloaded as a PDF (22 MB).